


Alternative Methods Of Communication

by SaintClaire



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5+1 Things, Bisexual Clint Barton, Comedy, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Found Family, Hawkeye and Hawkeye - Freeform, I nearly left Pizza Dog out of the characters, Kate Bishop Is a Good Bro, Kissing, all the dogs - Freeform, depends how you're measuring success, unsuccessful lip reading, well i mean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 01:36:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21291485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaintClaire/pseuds/SaintClaire
Summary: 5 times someone kissed Clint Barton because he was staring at their lips, and one the person who mattered did....This is based solely on a post on tumblr I saw 6 months ago - If you catch me looking at your lips when you talk, just kiss me.Suddenly, a lot of people just start kissing Deaf Clint Barton. It’s a bit awkward at first, but he rolls with it.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Kate Bishop, Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 2
Kudos: 94





	1. Everyone gets their first kiss, and then there’s Clint

**Author's Note:**

> I have been sitting on this story for months now. Forgot about it for a fair while, until I went through my WIP folder last night and now here it is! A kiss on the cheek to Children_in_a_Fairytale who so very kindly beta-read for me before I forgot this existed. All mistakes are mine, not hers. An additional thank you to clint-you-dummy, whose post made me take this prompt and run with it.

The first time someone kissed him, he’d just gallantly rescued her cat from a tree.

A walking bruise, he’d been ambling along home when he’d come across the teenage girl, looking rather pitiful, and the cat, looking equally pitiful, stuck 15 feet off the ground in a tree.

Five inch-long gouges in the back of his hand later, the cat looked much less pitiful. 

With no hearing aids and a faint ringing in his ears from his most recent concussion, Clint had been trying his best to follow the conversation – before the girl suddenly lunged forward, planted a kiss on his lips, immediately turned bright red, and then ran away, the cat tucked under her arm. 

He decided that it was fairly good, as first kisses go, and continued on home. Very heroic.

He looked in the mirror when he made it back to the caravan, and promptly found that the branch-shaped bruise on his forehead was well on its way to giving him a black eye, while the cat scratches on the back of his hand were beginning to turn an interesting shade of red.

15 year old Clint grinned at his reflection.

He had this kissing shit down, futz whatever Barney said.


	2. Older doesn’t necessarily equal wiser

At 25, Clint Barton was much better at kissing, and had learned to live his life one day at a time, rolling with the punches. He was homeless and then he wasn’t, he was with the circus, and then he wasn’t, he had a Katie-Cat – and then he didn’t. That one had hurt.

He’s been a SHIELD employee for 18 months now (and he’s still waiting with suspicion for the likely-unceremonious exit), and so far, the longest anything’s ever stuck around with Clint is the hefty dent to the bone on the left side of his nose. He’s officially given up on that ever healing, since it’s been there for three years. 

Katie-Cat promises she’s not gone for good, and she calls him every week or so. Tells him about her day, who she punched, what she broke, what her dad bought her as a guilt present. She’s good at school, good at lots of things he could never seem to get his head around – and she has friends. He can hear the smile in her voice when she calls.

But she’s there and he’s here – and Clint’s taken great pains to keep any knowledge of Kate Bishop far away from interested SHIELD personnel. 

He’s still not too sure how a very small Katie-Cat had wormed her way into his heart and demanded to stay, but he’d like to keep her there, for as long as possible. She’s tiny and purple and full of personal fury that Clint wishes he didn’t recognise, but she would also make him sit in the grass while she painstakingly practiced winding daisy chains into his hair. The day he caught her making bullseyes with his own recurve (her arm straining to draw the damn thing, hadn’t even made 10 candles on a birthday cake yet) he knew it was all over.

He carefully saves his stories for those phone calls – collecting up the scraps of his days, sorting out what’s violently illegal or internationally confidential. He told her about Coulson, who’s becoming more and more rock solid the longer Clint watches him – the kind of guy who he initially thought was just too trustworthy to be real, except it almost seems he really is. He told her about Nat, who he looked at one day, dead set on his mission - and then never looked away.

He told her about the minorly illegal betting match where he matched every single Bravo-team sniper shot for shot, lapping up their disbelief before he finally demanded they blindfold him and let him prove the point, because he had shit to get to. He won a thousand bucks and Maria Hill never found out about it, at least not to his knowledge.

He was looking forward to telling Katie about this one. 

...

_24 hours earlier, about seven blocks over from… somewhere_

God mafias were annoying. Just when you’ve finally cleaned one up, you turn around and a new one bit you in the ass. 

Everything had been going perfectly well, until they started to squabble among themselves, and then all hell broke loose. Suddenly the mission objective has been both figuratively and literally shot, there’s shards of glass sticking out of his shins like porcupine quivers, and there’s a full scale gang war being held in 2 hours.

He’s completed half the original mission objective, freeing the hostages from the dentist’s office. If anything, he’ll give the mafia this - he was a little impressed they’d thought to put the hostages in a stock-standard dentist’s building, rather than the traditional warehouse. Of course they’re arseholes, so he’s not actually going to tell them that but still. It’s nice to be able to do his damn job without a leaking ceiling dripping on his head. 

Most of the hostages were unhurt, and ran away as soon as he cut them loose, but one young woman has a twisted ankle. With nothing better to do for an hour, as ground intelligence scramble to reorganise reconnaissance, Clint offered to walk her home. 

Her name is Alice, and she’s a nice woman, who thanks him several times on the slow journey back to her apartment, only stopping when she runs out of new ways to phrase her gratitude. But eventually they strike up a conversation about the hockey (she plays semi-professionally), and then the trip passes in no time. 

Oddly enough, he’s no longer able to hear Nat breathing on the other end of Delta’s private comm line, and this is why he’s distracted enough to be find himself being spear-tackled to the ground as he opens Alice’s door for her. 

He flies backwards, with just enough time to register the twin-tone “BARTON?!” that suddenly erupts back through his earpiece before his head smashes into the floor and the comm unit goes flying across the corridor.

He groans, blinking up through a filter of… fur. Black fur. There’s a dog bouncing on his chest, giving him enthusiastic nose kisses.

“Oh, you’ve got a dog” said Clint, the flying rugby tackle having apparently knocked his brain-to-mouth filter out of his right ear along with the comms unit. He misses Alice’s reply, hefting himself into enough of a sitting position that he can give the good boy a hug.

7 miles away, Phil Coulson drops his head onto the folding table set up in the back of an emergency response van. Natasha abruptly slows down from where she’s taken off running and rolls her eyes at thin air.

He (“or she!”, snarks Kate’s voice in his head) is a great dog, some kind of cattle dog, if Clint’s not mistaken. He spends a couple of minutes just giving the Good Dog ear scritches, while the dog in return gives him many nose kisses and thoroughly inspects his left boot. Then it crosses his mind that Phil and Nat have just heard him crash musically to the floor, and his SHIELD-owned comm line is still sitting somewhere in the hallway of a public housing block. 

He spots the word ‘coffee’ from Alice as he crawls down the hallway on his hands and knees, looking for the stupid piece of black plastic, the dog an enthusiastic participant in the search. He finds it and pounces on it with a cry, spending a brief moment wrestling the Good Boy for it.

It’s still transmitting. Hopefully they didn’t hear him giving the dog air kisses. 

He beams at Alice as he picked himself off the floor. Now he’s actually looking at her properly, it turns out she’s offering to take him out for coffee.

Ah. Small issue with that.

“I’m allergic to coffee” he blurts outs. It’s not his finest moment, but he suspects he’s got a least a quarter of a concussion, or a minor dent in the back of his skull from her floor, so really, who can blame him? 

Well, Phil, it seems, if the little snort on the other end of his earpiece is any indication.

Alice looks a little taken aback, tries again, insisting that she owes him a ‘proper thank you’. Clint’s always been a little leery of ‘proper thank yous’. He’s had several, and most of the time the intended outcomes seems to be for him to get knifed. Or shot. Sometimes both, depending on who it’s from. 

He’s so busy trying to look earnest and good-natured, that he doesn’t realise what’s happening until it’s too late, when Alice leans in and presses a brief kiss to his lips. 

“Uhhhh…” 

Goddammit, more than one knock to the head in the same day and he’s useless.

“I’d uhh, better be going, but thanks for the offer. Things to do and all that. Mafia. Pretty sure there at least a few of them still around, I’ll go… find one.” 

He’s a little nonplussed, but carries on, quickly shoving his earpiece back in as she blushes and looks at the ground, starting to get it. “You and your dog are great though, I’m so glad I met you! Always nice to save, uhhh – nice people. Yeah.”

There’s a suspicious thud from his earpiece. Were his colleagues not trained professionals, he’d almost think someone was knocking their head against a desk. Must be imagining it. 

“Actually…” he does a bit of quick thinking on the spot, and hears simultaneous twin sighs in his ear. Oh good, they’re still there. He never has learned how Phil and Nat developed psychic powers, but dammit, he’s going to one day.

“If it’s okay, and you really do want to uh, thank me… Can I take your dog for a walk?”

…

Leash in hand, hearts in his eyes, and dog’s tail wagging happily, he started whistling show tunes as he bounced down the stairs, drooping a little when no string of Russian curses bit him in the ear. Alice was waving at the from the top platform, still with a slightly stunned look on his face. 

“Atta boy!” he beams, as dog fell over his own feet and made it down the last stair backwards.

No-one would expect a trained assassin to be walking his dog in the middle of the day. This was going to be _great _for his cover.

…

Several hours later, Clint’s got a bullet graze on one arm, half of his shirt is missing, and he’s fairly sure a chunk of hair over his right ear has been singed off.

Dog is panting happily against his chest, his tail rhythmically thumping against Clint’s shoulder as he wriggles with glee in his arms. 

Clint has temporarily christened him ‘Batdog’. He’s never actually seen a dog jump whimpering into a tree to hide, only to launch itself back out of a tree to land on a member of the Irish mafia, but there’s a first time for everything. He’d love to find out if Batdog has done any training with cattle.

A mental note to ask Alice about later.

He bought out the squashed remains of the day’s pizza from a very frazzled shop owner for Batdog, a reward for professional consulting on SHIELD business. A reward well shared, they munch on pizza as Clint walks back to where the SHIELD clean-up teams are parked. Coulson doesn’t look flustered (he never does) but there’s a somewhat agitated quality to his movements as various agents in black tactical gear run around with an assorted mix of police, army, and CIA agents. 

Good thing he bought the pizza as a snack, it doesn’t look like this mess is going to get cleared up any time soon. 

“Hey Phil!” he yells out, as he spots a momentary pause in Coulson’s steady stream of directions to a junior agent.

Coulson’s eye twitches as he spots them, Batdog downing the last of Clint’s pizza crust. 

Hmm. He possibly should have saved a few more slices for bribery.

…

In the midst of Coulson’s loud, and pointed annunciation about the use of civilian dogs in SHIELD operations, he tunes out somewhere. He’s haphazardly trying to scrape dried blood (his) and pizza sauce out of Batdog’s fur, wondering if there’s a nearby groomer he can maybe run him past before he has to get him back home, because at this point he’s not looking too flash.

He wonders if Alice will let him visit.

…

30 minutes and one very loud conversation later, it turns out Alice will not let him visit.

...

He’s sulking quietly to himself as they drive back to SHIELD, Sitwell blathering on about rabies shots from where he’s driving.

Alice had taken one look at him, standing on the doorstep looking the way you do when you’ve just taken on a significant chunk of the Irish mafia with a knife and a panicking tac. team, pulled Batdog out of his arms, and slammed the door in his face.

Batdog, still covered in a little bit of blood and a fair amount of pizza sauce let out a commiserative ‘woof’ as he disappeared. Clint’s not likely to see his new friend against any time soon.

He’ll take Katie and go stake out a dog park one day. Maybe make more new friends.

_Roll with the punches Barton, c’mon._

A thought occurs to him. “Hey Phil, we could get a dog as the next member of Strike Team Delta. They could be our mascot!”

Phil just looks at him. 

Eh, whatever. Nat will agree with him. 

Maybe he can convince her to come to the dog park with he and Katie as well. 


	3. There’s glitter in my eyes.  And my ears, and my mouth, and my nose…

The pulsing bass in the club was so loud that even if Clint hadn’t been able to feel it vibrating from almost a block away, he still could have heard it without his hearing aids.

He let himself get lost in the crowd, sinking into the frenzy around him. Tonight wasn’t the night to take the high perch – tonight, he was just the bait. 

His eyes drifted open slowly, when he felt the pressure of a stranger grinding lightly against his hip. He raised his hands to shoulder height, and let the other guy take the invitation to slip in front of him, winding his arms around his neck. 

He wasn’t drunk, for all his appearance said otherwise, but he kept up the look, winding his way through the hands and hips and thighs of the crowd in a delirious daze. It wasn’t comfortable, not by a long stretch, but there was something familiar about it; a reminder of off-nights at Carson’s where he’d paint on eyeliner and lose himself to the crowd of a nightclub, a million hands touching his skin at any one time. 

However, he wasn’t Hawkeye for nothing. Every so often he caught glimpses of the important things; a flash of Nat’s hair, a shifting light glancing off Sitwell’s head. The crowd tightens in on itself, just as Clint dances into position, to become caught in an inward-turning spiral – with the mark in the middle. 

The dancers close formation, and the whorl continues following the path of a seashell, to push Clint closer to the mark.

Gabriel Antonelli was 26 years old, with a skill set in data software engineering that outshone most of the employees of the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI combined. Gabriel was also on enough antidepressants to medicate all of his respecting rivals, and reportedly miserable under his ultra-conservative right-wing father. He had only the bare bones of a white-hat hacker’s rap-sheet, and if there was more to it than his un-redacted file suggested, he had been good enough to keep from being discovered. 

SHIELD, as directed by the World Security Council was swooping in to play the nice guys, offering a shiny new job and a life out from under Daddy’s thumb, and hence Clint was offered up as the bait for the hook.

A fish painted rainbow; he had joked to Phil when the orders came down. Coulson, bless his soul, had utilised a small selection of swear words at very high volume, and promptly went off to knock some heads together in command, about why it was illegal to offer employees up as prostitutes. 

He spotted Nat’s hair flash briefly past his line of sight as he finally came up against Gabriel’s side. Clint looked like a hot mess, both deliberately and from the numerous interested hands that had gone exploring over the last couple of hours, but he had nothing on Gabriel. The younger man had slipped deeply into the calm insanity that spread throughout packed nightclubs, his eyes half-lidded as his body leapt in time with the music without conscious thought or planning.

Spinning on one foot to dance with the person diagonal from him for a moment, he let his head fall back as he felt fingertips brush across the belt at his waist, barely there before returning with confidence.

He let Gabriel reach out and pull him closer, turning around and sliding his hands under the open tails of Gabriel’s shirt as they weaved around each other. He wound his way further into Gabriel’s personal space, nudging at the taller man’s chin with his forehead, pushing him back to reality.

He watched Gabriel’s eyes widen a little as he stepped back, taking in Clint’s muscles and lack of a shirt, smugly grinning internally. 

The lights strobed, skipping beams of white-blue light through the club like daggers. Clint leaned in a little more, concentrating on watching Gabriel’s lips move in the shifting dark.

The kiss was sudden and intense, hot lips against his before they suddenly disappeared, only to reappear at the base of his neck. He could feel the SHIELD team closing in, but Clint let his eyes roll back in his head, drunk off the vibrating beat and the crowd energy, and pulled Gabriel’s face back to his to kiss him properly. 

Deaf, glitter-blind and missing a shirt, he hooked his fingers through Gabriel’s belt loops and began to travel backwards, pulling them out of the writhing dancers, making for the back exit that lead to a side-alley. He felt Gabriel follow willingly, mouth attempting to form words that he kissed away, internally groaning as he stopped Gabriel’s hand from where it was moving in on the button at the top of his jeans, throwing open the door to the outside.

The sudden blast of cold air to his naked upper half was a rude shock.

He felt Gabriel startle against him as he swung around, planting his feet to place the 26 year old genius squarely in front of Agent Phillip Coulson; tidily dressed, pristine suit, mild-mannered smile in place.

“Gabriel Antonelli” Coulson said smoothly. “I’m here on behalf of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. I’d like a moment to discuss your current employment options with you.”

Clint slipped away, leaving Coulson to his happy place of shady bureaucracy negotiations. He craned his head looking for Nat, and wilted a little when Sitwell shook his head at him, indicating in mangled shorthand signs that she had already left.

He looked back to where Gabriel was standing, looking vaguely stunned and still sparkling from the generous coating of glitter he was sporting, took a moment to subtly adjust his trousers while still in the shadows, and spent a few moments developing a thought.

He thought it through for about 5 seconds, and then agreed with himself. 

…

An hour later, Gabriel Antonelli, newly minted SHIELD employee turned the corner of the building to get out to the street only to come across a man lounging against the wall.

A very familiar man lounging against a wall, eyeliner soft but not smudging, with thighs clad in jeans that Gabriel had run his hands all over earlier that evening.

Clint cocked his head and grinned. “Fair’s fair,” he said, voice laced with innuendo. “Can I give you a ride somewhere? Maybe a drink to celebrate the job offer?”

Gabriel’s eyes flicked down to where Clint’s hands where resting in the top of his pockets, index finger spinning the keys to the Harley to smack into his thigh. 

His eyes travelled back up to Clint’s.

“I accept” he said slowly, his own grin creeping back onto his face. “But I’ll skip that drink.” 


	4. Sobriety is for cowards

The thing that happened one time with Tony was, well, just another entry on the list of ‘things that happened one time with Tony’. 

Steve had declared every first Monday of the month to be team bonding night, offering wholesome suggestions of board games, a friendly round of sport, or ‘community participation’.

Tony, offended by the general idea of wholesome, family-friendly Ping-Pong matches had instead challenged them all to strip poker, because that was his idea of a compromise. 

Clint, fairly drunk and having already lost his shirt, trousers, hearing aids, one sock, and a considerable amount of knives was still in better condition than Tony, who was equally drunk and entirely unashamed of his heart-printed boxers.

They’re both having a ball, except the toes on Clint’s right foot are freezing. He always gets cold feet easily, a leftover from being a barefoot carnie. 

Bruce turned green in a way that for once had nothing to do with the Hulk and declined to play, Steve lost his clothing down to his trousers before his delicate sensibilities protested and he conceded an early defeat, and Nat, Rhodey, and Phil flat out refused to play because they were smart like that.

“My boxers are still better than yours Barton, what is this, the 90’s?” 

He’s fairly sure Phil is now filming them on his phone, Earth’s mightiest heroes clutching a handful of cards to their chest in their underwear.

Man, Clint was becoming perilously close to ending up in his birthday suit if an ace of hearts didn’t appear sometime soon. 

Thank God Katie had chosen to go to America’s place instead of following him up for the night.

…

_Finally. _

Plucking the newly arrived ace of hearts from the table with a flick of his wrist, he fanned his cards and laid them dramatically on the table. 

Royal Flush.

Tony let out a shriek of outrage so high pitched that Clint could hear without his hearing aids. Hell, Lucky had probably heard it from Bed Stuy.

Clint cackled, and Tony got up grumbling. They had both gone past the point of happily drunk, but Tony was in a great mood - he was hardly a graceful loser but he was a good sport, making a dramatic, flourishing bow to the room at large before unceremoniously dropping his boxers.

Clint nearly fell off his chair laughing as Steve went pink, turning his face away politely. Tony wobbled precariously as he made to step out of his boxers, and Clint lunged for him, catching him princess style before the billionaire could crack his head on the tiles.

He saw Steve mutter something, still red-faced out of the corner of his eye and turned back to Tony to watch the incoming obnoxious reply.

Only to have Tony throw his arms around his neck, and give him a smacking kiss on the lips. 

Huh. It really was a good thing Katie was at America’s or she’d have teamed up with JARVIS to get video evidence of this. 

He played it up for the show, ignorant to Steve’s squawk of embarrassment; grabbed Tony by the waist and dipped him, going into an open-mouthed French kiss before breaking away to snigger at Rhodey’s wolf-whistling as he brought them back up.

Tony, as was his style, barely paused to catch his breath. 

“You really know how to treat a girl Barton. What, Rodgers, no darting glances? I’m hurt. I’m devastated. Is the state of my naked body not even-“

The state of Tony’s naked body was sharply interrupted as Clint, not expecting to catch his foot in Tony’s recently not-quite-discarded boxers brought them both crashing to the floor.

Aww man. Good thing he didn’t do that while dipping him. 

The whole team was now laughing good naturedly at them as Clint rolled onto his back and grinned at the head that appeared above him, which turned out to be Pepper. Pepper only rolled her eyes and smiled, stepping gracefully over Tony’s body in her stilettos as she went to pour herself a drink. 

Tony was still making indeterminate squawking noises from somewhere to the left of him (jeez, he hadn’t drunk this much since he’d gone head to head with Deadpool in a drinking competition. And then he hadn’t been able to bear even a whiff of booze for months, but live and let learn.)

Rhodey, with the fond and exasperated smile of someone who has already done this too many times before, appeared like a good-natured saint from above. He kicked lightly at Clint’s foot, which suddenly hit the floor that was apparently several inches lower than he had thought.

He rolled his head to watch as Rhodey heaved Tony off the floor and half carried him out of the room, laughingly pushing Tony’s face aside as he made to kiss Rhodey’s cheek.

Steve looked scandalised.

Clint laughed so hard he felt tears leak out of the corners of his eyes.

The floor was comfortable really. Nice and horizontal. All he needed now was for Lucky to come an act as a hot water bottle.

The vibration of Nat’s footsteps on the floor was as familiar to him as the silent creak of his bowstring, but his eyes were closing of their own accord, and he couldn’t seem to work out how to open them again.

The floor was warm, and a floor was a good place for sleeping. Or contemplating things. Or passing out with a concussion and three cracked ribs. Clint should know, he ended up there often enough.

He felt a hand wind it’s way into his hair, fingers stroking gently over his scalp, and it’s nice for a moment, before the same hand promptly drags his head up by the hair.

“Ow”, he complains, swatting feebly in Nat’s direction (he hopes). 

An equally soft hand suddenly tips his chin up, and he squints at his partner’s face. For an instant, Natasha looks… almost upset, but it’s gone in an instant and Clint writes it off as just a tipsy hallucination. 

“Up Barton,” she orders, and he can see she’s taking great pains to speak clearly. He appreciates that, absolutely, because he’s not entirely sure at the moment whether he’s squinting with one eye open, or two. 

What did Stark put in his glass? It was like there were horse tranquilisers hidden in the scotch. He’s got an impressive tolerance for cheap beer, he could hold his liquor as well as anyone (Deadpool didn’t count), but the moment he had a couple of glasses of the fancy stuff he got knocked on his ass. 

He felt Nat heave a sigh, and he suddenly found the floor was not underneath him anymore, with a strong possibility that he was standing on two legs again. 

“Heyyy, thanks Nat” he mumbled, tipping his head back to smile at her. 

He liked her face. It was his favourite, of all the faces. Maybe not Lucky’s, but wait – wasn’t Lucky in a different category? You couldn’t compare a Nat and a Lucky.

“You’re the best.”

And then he promptly found himself flying in the direction of the couch.

When Clint woke up, it took him awhile to notice he was wearing both socks. 


	5. It’s called selective deafness for a reason

Agent Kay was relatively new to SHIELD. 

She’s tiny, unassuming, blond-haired with a smile that makes Maria Hill smile back when she sees her, and overall Kay doesn’t look like she could hurt a fly. 

She was also a crack shot with a sniper rifle, found 3 weeks ago (by Clint) in a holding cell for the Ukrainian military.

She burned the damn place to the ground on their way out.

…

Clint’s not crushing, okay? He’s not. Sitwell keeps giving him knowing looks, and even Phil has opened his mouth once or twice and then abruptly closed it again, but none of this changes the fact that Clint _does not have a romantic crush on Kay. _

A professional crush, maybe. A platonic crush, that dedicates itself to admiring the way Kay can spit bullets at targets that are hardly visible with a scope. No-one apart from Nat and Kate has come anywhere _close _to matching him at target shooting. Nat’s been laid up in bed for days with symptoms from radioactive goo, Katie’s in Washington for some reason, and Kay’s fun to play with on the obstacle course.

No-one ever wants to practice parkour in the rain paintball with him, it’s nice to have a challenger. 

Huh, maybe he should invite Deadpool one day. Seems like the kind of thing he’d get a kick out of. Invite Spidey as well, and he’d be guaranteed to get his butt in gear.

…

He’s been given strict orders that Nat is to be left as alone as humanly possible. While he’s been assured, by every single one of Stark’s medical staff that she won’t come to any permanent harm from the nuclear goo, she’s contagious until declared otherwise. 

He’ll never tell her this, but seeing her looking so small and fragile in the railed hospital bed makes him unsettled. He’s been sleeping in the air vents directly above her each night, just in case. 

He knows it’s Stark Tower, and JARVIS wouldn’t let anyone that shouldn’t be there within 50 floors of the medical wing, but it’s the principle of the matter. You don’t let your partner sleep alone when they’re down for the count, you stand watch. And this way, he can check that she’s still breathing whenever he wants to, and no-one else is going to know about it. 

…

He normally can’t be bothered dealing with other people when he clocks into the range. 

Nat is the exception, and Coulson is… the other exception, but usually he just likes to take out his hearing aids and play the “oh I’m deaf and can’t hear you” card. Works every time; unwanted people sod off and he gets to shoot in peace.

Well, except for that time he met Katie. Hard to continue shooting when there’s a six year old wrapped around your leg watching you do it. 

He’s in an excellent mood. The sun is shining, Nat is getting better, Stark made him more of the boomerang arrows, and there’s fresh coffee in the pot. So when someone approaches him from behind, he doesn’t even ‘accidentally’ elbow them out of existence.

“Oh hey!” he said enthusiastically, seeing Kay. Of all people to be interrupted by, she’s pretty good. “Didn’t see you there.”

Kay grinned and waggled her eyebrows. “Heard you were down here, thought I’d come practice with you. Sitwell wants me to run through protocol drills with him again.”

Clint snickered, nodding his head. “Honoured to be your better offer.” He made a vague gesture with his hand, eyeing the dart gun Kay’s holding. “Pull up a target. Trade you and compare scores?”

Kay grinned at him as she held the gun up and posed theatrically.

“You’re on.”

…

Kay is one of the best shots in the world, but he’s Hawkeye, and there’s a reason for it.

They kill an hour just screwing around, as he cheerfully beats her shot for shot with his bow, the dart gun, a regular gun, and then a blow pipe, just for the fun of it. 

Sitwell eventually finds them, and Clint simply turns around to effectively block out the lecture on the importance of protocol and procedure drills. There’s a text on his phone from Nat, and he beamed at the cracked screen – she’s finally being let out of quarantine this afternoon.

Forget the range, he’s got places to be. He pulls his gear together, waves at Jasper as he leaves, the other agent lifting his hand in response. Now he knows that Nat’s finally getting sprung before Clint dies of old age, he’s in a hurry to get back to Stark Tower. He’s not a complete arse though, so he stays to help Kay pack up her gear. 

“Thanks for the match” he said, dismantling the handgun and slamming the lid of the case, turning so he can see Kay’s mouth. “I know you’ve got uh, shit to do and stuff, but if you ever want another round just give me a-“

They’re side by side at the bench, so it only takes Kay a simple step to move directly into his personal space. 

Aww shit, his internal voice groans, and then Kay’s kissing him. 

He’s frozen to the floor, still holding his bow in one hand and a case of darts in the other, but Kay twines around him, reaching up to cup his face as she continued to kiss him.

She’s new, and he doesn’t want to be a dick and push her off, but he doesn’t want to kiss her back, and _shit_, Coulson’s going to give him another speech about fraternization within the ranks and-

And _that _is when the range doors open, and one very pale, very pissed off Natasha Romanoff walks in and catches sight of Clint, frozen in lip lock with a junior agent.

_Aww, kissing, no. _


	6. +1 - I’ve had a lot of different kisses, but man, I like yours best

It takes seven days before Natasha’s willing to talk to him again, and only if the interpretation of ‘talk’ can be taken pretty loosely.

Coulson took one look at them, Clint chasing his partner out of SHIELD, trying to explain himself when he didn’t even know what he was trying to explain, and packed Clint off to Tasmania for an op. 

He’s been in Australia for all of 8 hours, freaking out and setting himself up for a couple of days observation before Coulson joins him, fresh off the plane with his suit perfectly unwrinkled. 

For the next three days, Clint spies on a clandestine business meeting in Hobart, planting bugs on everyone involved he can find. Coulson cooks him meals at regular intervals, sorts his wrinkled papers into some sort of order, and sends him to bed every 20 hours without fail. 

Thank god for Coulson, or Clint would have gone insane by now. 

…

There’s a distinct possibility Coulson has been in contact with Katie-Cat in the last few days.

Katie’s made no secret to Clint over the years that SHIELD is not exactly her cup of tea, but she’s waiting in the briefing room when he and Coulson trudge in to give the initial report. Clint’s gloomily wondering if he can convince Nat to forgive him for getting kissed by his own trainee if he does her mission report paperwork for a year, and then Lucky knocks over 3 junior agents and the stand the water tank sits on when he leaps on Clint in a joyous hello.

Clint’s day improves very quickly. 

Katie’s wearing one of his old pairs of purple shades, and there’s a knowing smirk on her face as she pushes a familiar-looking dented travel mug in his direction. 

Brazilian roast. 

Sometimes he doesn’t know what he did to deserve Kate Bishop. 

…

Kate drives like a maniac in New York’s crazy traffic (Clint taught her himself, he’s very proud), and it turns out that his coffee was spiked with sleeping pills, or possibly just decaf.

Katie-Cat is a cheating cheater. 

He’s dozing on his feet as Kate shoves him up the stairs, Lucky cheerfully acting as a four-legged hazard but doing his absolute best to help.

Clint’s going to give him all of the pats. Just as soon as the ground stays still underneath him.

...

They have two bedrooms, but Clint hasn’t done laundry for a couple of months and he’s got a feeling Kate knows it. She steers him efficiently into her bed, unceremoniously knocking his legs out from underneath him and sending him crumpling onto the mattress. 

“Love you Katie-Cat.” he slurred, trying and failing to pick his face up from the pillow.

He feels Kate huff in reply, bonking him gently on the nose before she moved to heft his legs up so all of him is in the bed. His eyes are closed, and he tries to flail out with his hand to catch hold of Katie, but he can’t find her and he misses.

He distantly hears himself make a sad noise, but is then distracted by a small, warm person climbing into bed with him, the smell of Kate’s shampoo wafting up his nostril. She wriggles into his arms, squashing him in a full body hug the way they would fall asleep together when she was little. He feels her thump her hand several times against his hip, and then Lucky is climbing on top of both of them, flopping down to join the cuddle pile.

Clint pressed a drowsy kiss on the top of Kate’s head, and he’s more or less asleep when she biffs him gently back. 

“Go to sleep Hawkeye. Everything will be fine.”

…

Natasha raised an eyebrow at him as he walked into Stark Tower, having slept for 14 hours wrapped up bed with Katie and Lucky, and developed one hell of a crick in his neck. 

“Steve wants us training with the doom-bot simulation” she said, idly flicking dirt out from under her fingernails with a butterfly knife. “Spar with me after?”

Two hours later, he’s been thoroughly pummelled in the ground, and his body has turned into a walking bruise.

Nat gave him a small smile as she sat down beside him, where he’s lying flat on his back, gasping for breath on the floor. 

Clint whined, making grabby hands at the bottle of water sitting on her other side. Natasha rolled her eyes, but passed the bottle over, gently kicking him affectionately on the side of the head with her boot as she did it. 

Clint grinned, tipping the water over his face and chest, huffing a laugh at the “eurghh” of disgust Nat made as a puddle of water formed quickly underneath him. 

Back to normal then.

Except less than two days later, they assemble for an Avengers mission, and everything goes pear-shaped all over again.

...

Clint rounded the corner of Stark tower only to hurl himself to the ground, narrowly missing the ballet slipper that made an audible ‘thunk’ against the wall where his head had just been. 

Commando crawling on his belly, sticking slightly from the generous layer of alien goo he was coated in, he very cautiously stuck his head around the corner, straining his head to look up at a very irritated pair of legs.

He only had one hearing aid – (half a hearing aid? Something was definitely not right) but he could hazard a guess that the stream of blurred, crackling-sharp Russian coming from one of the directions meant the legs were not pleased. 

If only he could work out why.

He barely managed to get out a plaintive “Nat-“, before another projectile zoomed overhead, ruffling the hairs on his scalp and the legs in question stormed off.

Clint continued to lay on the floor for a few more moments, cautiously feeling for the vibrations on the tile that might mean she was coming back. Tentatively, still keeping a sharp lookout for fiery, red-headed Russians, he levered himself off the floor, wiping absently at the smear of blood he left along the side of the side of the wall.

He was prepared to give up and call it a day; drink some coffee, have a shower (maybe combine the two, whoever decided you shouldn’t eat in a bathroom had clearly never been a master spy), and collapse on the couch while persuading JARVIS to put Dog Cops on.

“Shall I have the coffee maker set to Irish, Agent Barton, or would you perhaps prefer decaf?”

JARVIS projected messages against the wall for occasions exactly such as these, where Clint had managed to wreck yet another very expensive set of hearing aids, but he still somehow managed to sound dryly amused and a little judgemental at the same time. 

Must have learned from Phil. On slow days, Coulson still enjoyed editing Clint’s mission reports in red pen, and sending them back to him, for ‘future reference’. Lucky loved chasing after them once Clint had folded them into paper aeroplanes.

“You’re a peach, JARVIS” he slurred out, wincing internally as he crashed through the bathroom door and noticed the snail trail of blood and … something behind him.

He plucked out the remaining malfunctioning hearing aid, still merrily hiccupping away in his ear, and pitched it in the direction of the bin.

Futzing tequila. The mission was going great until the mark got drunk.

He turned the shower on, dropped his pants, threw the remaining clothing in the corner of the room and promptly let out a groan when he turned around and came face to face with himself in the bathroom mirror.

“Aww, lipstick, no.” 

…

Clint’s kissed a lot of people, throughout his somewhat-longer-than-expected life. 

It had always been one of those _things_– a little weird, but no big deal, sometimes fun.

He’d be talking to people, friends, strangers, targets, amiably nodding along with the conversation and suddenly find someone was kissing him. 

And never one to turn down a kiss, he’d kiss them back. 

Sometimes it got a little hairy – that one time with that girl’s ex-SAS fiancée still makes him cringe a little. There was that other time, during his short-lived marriage to Bobbi, in his early days at SHIELD but he doesn’t really like to think about that.

Anyway, he knows Bobbi still checks up on him every now and again through Kate. He sends her a (late) Christmas card every year and a jar of peanut brittle and they call it even. It’s a system that still makes Phil shake his head in bewilderment, but it’s a system that works, and that’s what matters.

It’s not even like the kissing thing happens _often,_ it just happens every couple of weeks or months (occasionally days), when he’s usually had a rough go of it and tries to have a nice conversation with someone.

Normally it’s a woman, usually it’s in a crowded bar (like today’s), but every so often fate decides to mix it up a little. A couple of random kisses here and there are by far the least of his problems, so all in all he’s pretty happy to just shrug his shoulders and keep on kickin’.

Usually. 

…

Clean, de-gunked, and de-lipsticked, he went to go see if Nat’s door was open.

They share the floor, by mutual agreement when they first moved in, even though Stark had built everyone a floor of their own. That would have been too far away they, so without discussion Natasha moved her stuff upstairs one day, and that was that. He stared sadly at the closed door for a minute, and clomped downstairs to the garage.

If he’s learned anything in the 15 years he’s spent as a secret spy, it’s that when the going gets tough, the tough go cuddle a dog. 

…

Katie-Cat’s somehow managed to boot him out of his own apartment – she’s comfortably holed up in Bed-Stuy with Pizza Dog and an entire apartment of varyingly lethal weapons, but she’s happy. 

The coffee pot seems to be permanently on, and the couch-shaped imprint of Clint is still as sagging and comfortable as ever when he does head over there, so really, life is good. 

One or two less ballet slippers and bricks to the head might be nice, but what’s a concussion or two among friends?

…

He’s deep in the clutches of the couch, whining to Kate about his latest lipstick-smearing admirer, and his protégée is just openly laughing at him.

“Geez, Katie” he grumbled. “I don’t even know how it happens, why does everyone hafta get so upset about it?”

Kate snickers from where she’s sprawled out in the armchair. Lucky, the only member of this little family who has any sympathy for Clint lets out a deep woof and scrambles on top of him, planting a heavy foot in his already-bruised groin.

Kate laughs a bit harder as Clint nearly hurls himself off the couch in an effort to dislodge Pizza Dog.

“Gonna have to start feeding you less pepperoni”, he says to Lucky’s goofily smiling face. “No I mean it Hawkeye, why do all these random people kiss me? I mean you don’t have strangers suddenly plant one on you in the street, or in the bar or whatever…” he trailed off and turns his head to the side suddenly, squinting at her. “Actually, scratch that last one. I don’t want to know what you get up to in bars. But seriously, why?”

Kate sighs at him, shaking her head as is her duty of the Responsible Adult and clicks her tongue to call Lucky back. Happily, Lucky leaps off Clint in a move that causes no more damage than a tail-slap to the face, leaving him spitting out dog hair.

“I dunno Hawkeye” she said, her tone of voice making it clear she’s still mocking him. “I mean, actually I do know, but you can figure that out yourself. You’ve kissed enough people by now to figure out the pattern, use that remaining brain cell.”

He made a face at the ceiling. The ceiling remains unimpressed. 

“Stop making me sound like a slut in this scenario.”

Kate’s voice is a little sharper now. “Hey. Watch it. We are pro-slut and pro- people’s-choice-of-sexual-partners-is-up-to-them in this household Barton.” She casually slung a cushion at his head, which he allowed to hit him in the face before he nodded. 

Much more subtle than a brick. Or a pointe shoe. 

“Besides, where do you get off? You’re kissing them all back, you dummy.”

“Because I don’t know what else to do about it!” he yelped. “And I don’t kiss all of them back.”

“You kissed Emma back, and Marie, and that red-headed guy from the donut stand, and the –“

“Alright, alright” he muttered, feeling his face start to heat up. “I kissed a couple of them back. I was drunk for most of those. Or on painkillers.”

“Not that day at the donut stand you weren’t, that guy was just built like a –“

Lucky looked up in concern at Clint’s exaggerated groan, and came over to worryingly nose at Clint’s face.

“It annoys Nat” he said mulishly. “I don’t even know why.”

The sudden silence is prominent enough that he tilts his head back to look at Kate across the room, staring at him with a strange mix of pity and fondness on her face. She got up without replying, and crossed the room to climb on top of the bench, hooking out the special coffee mugs from the back of the top shelf in the kitchen cabinet.

Safe from stray arrows (not that _stray _is really a term that can be applied to arrows in their house), these are the Bad Day coffee mugs. They’re more special than the Clint-forgot-to-pay-the-bills-so-we’re-having-instant-coffee-with-tap-water mugs; even more special than the I-have-a-concussion-and-possibly-some-broken-ribs coffee mugs. 

He likes to tease Kate that her penchant for making mugs-for-every-occasion collections are one of the leftovers from her life as an heiress, but, well – they see a lot of use.

Katie poured them both a cup of coffee and comes over to sit on the end of Clint’s couch, shifting his legs so they’re lying across her lap. 

He makes a squawking noise, letting Kate arrange him to get more comfortable. 

“I never know when the hell it’s going to happen. It could be anyone. It could be you.”

The look that suddenly appears on Kate’s face is glorious. Almost worth sitting through this conversation to start with.

Her voice is drier than dust when she replies. “Hate to break it to you Hawkeye, but it’s _really not _going to be me who kisses you next.” 

His nose wrinkled in disgust at the thought but he grins, twisting his head at a weird angle so he can see her face again, wincing as his neck cracks.

“What, no love Hawkeye? I thought you liked me.”

Kate puts her coffee cup down on the bare skin of his stomach where his shirt has ridden up, and he yelps as the burning M*A*S*H* logo sizzles against his skin. 

“Alright, alright! No-one’s kissing anyone.” 

Kate picks her cup back and gives his knees a playful shove. “You’re a dummy, Hawkeye.”

The sentiment was oddly comforting. 

“Good to know Katie-Cat”, he said to the ceiling, and they got on with drinking their coffee to the opening jingle of the antiques road show. 

...

In the end it came down to a boot. His boot, to be specific; his very, very stuck boot, that refuses to come off his rapidly swelling foot. 

He’s only just started to eye the butcher knives on the kitchen counter, seriously contemplating just hacking at the damn thing until it’s off his foot, when Nat sighs behind him. 

“Coulson wants me to come in” she grumbled, shoving her phone back into her pants. Somewhere in her pants. 

Logistically, there must be a pocket, but Clint can’t see one, and anyway, he’s resigned himself long ago to the mysterious magic of the number of things Natasha can hide in her pants.

“I’m going to have to turn around and go back to SHIELD, he’s heading out to London tonight.”

Clint makes a grabby motion at his shoelaces, hoping the shoelaces will realise how serious he is and untie themselves before he topples over from where he’s standing on one exhausted foot.

“If I have to deal with that idiot in - BARTON.”

Clint’s own feet have betrayed him. He’ll never recover. 

Thankfully, long-used to making sudden dives for him as he falls out of trees or out of cars or after dogs, there are no new dents in his head. He’s on his arse on the floor, Natasha saved him from another concussion, and the benefit about falling to your arse on the floor is that there’s _generally_ no further to fall.

Nat swats at him half-heartedly as she gracefully sits down beside him, taking his foot in her hands.

“I don’t understand how you can make a perfect shot to the eye from half a kilometre away but twist your ankle falling over a fire hydrant” she said quietly, fingers slipping easily under the tangle of knots that are pretending to be a shoelace.

He grins crookedly at her, wriggling a little closer to take the pressure off his leg. 

“You know me, farsightedness. Should get some glasses.” and then he yelps at the sudden flick to his nose.

“If that fire hydrant had four legs and a tail, you still would have twisted your ankle, but you would have twisted your ankle lunging to pet it. You don’t need glasses Barton, you need…” Nat hesitated. She was smiling to herself, fingers gently prying the filthy leather boot off his foot. “You need a crash mat.”

He groans dramatically, lifting a hand to cover his heart, trying to force his mouth to stop grinning and grimace appropriately. 

“Low blow partner, you’ll hurt my feelings.” He perks up suddenly, remembering. “Actually, I think we might have one around here somewhere. Was teaching Katie-Cat how to shoot her bow while doing gymnastics and we broke the DVD player, so we got a crash mat. Where’d that go?”

“Hopeless” Natasha said very softly to herself, smiling at where she’s now prodding the length of Clint’s bare foot, checking for bruises. “Absolutely hopeless.”

She lifts herself smoothly up from the floor, and extends a hand to give him a lift up but he waved her off. “You head out to SHIELD. I think I might just stay on the floor, crawl to the shower. Safer that way, you know?”

Natasha snorts, running a hand through her hair. “Yeah, I know. Think you can crawl to the bathroom without the floor giving way beneath you?”

God he loves Nat. Who else would understand that sometimes the floor just won’t cooperate?

He lets his head tip back on his shoulders, feeling a goofy smile roll over his face. “Love you too Nat. I’ll see you tomorrow, or maybe uh, the day after. I’ll get Kate to piggyback me.”

The smile that comes over Natasha’s face makes a happy warmth bloom in his belly, which might be why he’s so utterly unprepared for what comes next.

She leans down, touching his face gently from where he’s still looking to watch her and kisses him gently, briefly, on the lips before she straightens up and walks out, closing the door behind her.

Static. 

Static. 

Clint’s brain is nothing but

Blaring.

Roaring.

Static. 

It takes him several attempts to use the barstool to pick himself up, wobbling dangerously, still staring at the front door like she’s about to kick it in and decapitate him.

And then he very calmly turns around and shrieks a litany of curses at the wall in high-pitched Russian, hands fisting in his hair.

He screeches for several minutes, a mess of panic and confusion and feelings, and that happy warmth in his belly has turned to the mud that is caking his boots and what does he do, _what does he do?_

Eventually he lets his hands fall to his side and just stands there horrified. 

She’s going to eviscerate him, once she realises what she’s done. She’s going to realise that Clint actually does have the terrible, all-consuming crush that he insisted he didn’t have, that everyone else insisted he did have, and Natasha is going to _end him. _

He decides he can walk to the shower after all, if the walk to the shower doesn’t manage to do him in, he can drown. Either way, at least he won’t be in the direct path of the door when she comes back to kill him. 

He turns around, and then very suddenly stops.

Bucky blinks at him from where he’s sitting on the floor behind the kitchen island, resting against the counter and eating peanut butter of the jar with a spoon. 

The dumbfounded look on his face is enough to remind Clint that he spent futz-knows-how-many years of his life in Soviet Russia, where the people speak Russian.

Clint blinks back, and they both stare at each other in horror for a moment.

Bucky gingerly extends his arm and offers him the jar of peanut butter.

...

When Kate comes home, they’re both sitting on the kitchen floor, taking turns licking peanut butter off the one spoon. 

He’s still in shock, and it’s just been that kind of day.

At least Katie looks equally shocked, faced with a pair of world-renowned lethal assassins sitting on the floor being incredibly unhygienic with a jar of peanut butter.

“Hey” said Kate, slowly dropping her bag to the floor. “What did I miss?”

Bucky just looks at him.

…

Natasha apparently does not flee the country in the 24 hours after she kisses Clinton Francis Barton, national hero and resident dumbass. 

Clint knows this, because he spends much of those 24 hours watching the Nat’s emergency escape channels, none of which she is using. Not the fake passports, the credit cards, the safe house, the other safe house, or the other secret safe house that even Clint doesn’t actually know about yet, he just saw the email with the purchase details by accident a few days ago. 

It’s now 4am and Clint hasn’t slept in over 3 days, his face awash in the blue light of his cracked laptop screen, still open on the remote security feed of the Stark Tower exits. 

Is he supposed to flee the country instead? Maybe that’s what he’s supposed to do. It sure feels like that’s what he’s supposed to do. 

And so, because Clint is a Certified Adult with a history of good decision making, he books it.

...

Kate Bishop, a person made solely from love, snark and archery, expert in all things Hawkeye who is also a Certified Adult with a very different history of good decision making catches up with him in a motel in Connecticut, because she just knows things like that. 

He’s sitting on the bed, staring helplessly at the tangled array of passport photos and identity documents. 

In all the years he’s spent making careful contingency plans to run away, he’s never, ever pictured himself trying to run from Nat. 

He has no plans, no escape routes, no identities that she doesn't know about. 

He’s just never considered it.

So now he’s trying to run away from the Black Widow with no plan, making things up as he goes along, and god, this is _Nat_, he doesn’t want to do this oh god oh god -

Kate’s hand is warm on his shoulder. She taps slow, careful beats into the palm of his hand as he works to get his breathing under control, eventually able to slow down to the tempo Kate sets. 

When his head finally clears enough to breathe, he realises that there are tears in his eyes and his chest is still shuddering. Kate crawls into his lap and pulls him into a full body hug, koala-ing onto him and tucking her face into his neck. 

Lucky’s head appears in their laps, and he whines, staring dolefully up at Clint. Kate absent-mindedly drops a hand down to give him head scritches, still holding onto Clint tightly, her breath warm against his shoulder. Eventually he calms down enough to start patting Lucky as well, and they sit there together, curled up in a dingy motel room jus patting Pizza Dog, who keeps giving Clint worried nudges with his nose. 

Kate’s voice breaks the silence after a long time, and Clint flinches. 

“Bucky told me what happened.”

Lucky’s nose wedges itself further into his hip in comfort.

“Should’a said something, Hawk.”

Yeah, he should have. 

Kate takes pity on him, and lets him curl up in her lap for the rest of the night, Lucky flopped over the both of them. 

...

It’s Kate though. So when Kate offers to drive the next day, he lets her willingly, crashing in the passenger seat and then has the audacity to be surprised when he wakes up and they’re driving over the Brooklyn bridge.

“We don’t run away from our problems Hawkeye,” said Kate firmly. “You get three days at best to avoid it and mope like a man, and then it’s time to woman up and deal with it.”

Except, of course, in the 12 hours Clint’s been asleep in the seat of Katie’s car, Natasha Romanoff has disappeared off the face of the earth, as they discover when they arrive at Stark Tower.

Tony has spent the last 48 hours flat on his back with his head up an engine, so he’s of no help to Clint whatsoever. Bruce shrugs when he asks where Nat is, and JARVIS can only tell him she enabled privacy mode before she left the tower. 

Thankfully, at some point Clint remembers he is an international spy who once-upon-a-time specialised in finding people who made it their jobs to stay unfound. It was a bit like graduating from kindergarten and then picking up the collected works of Shakespear, but Clint had spent years cultivating a sense of selectively blind optimism, and there was no reason to give that up now. 

He was hoping she hadn’t run-away, run-away - he was hoping it was more of a I-have-slunk-off-to-my-den-to-plot-Clint’s-death run-away. It was the difference between finding Nat this afternoon, and have to spend 8 months running around the world, starting in Russia and ending in Florida.

Nat despised Florida - unless maybe he should start there because she knew he knew she hated it and the whole thing was a carefully crafted double, triple bluff. Goddammit. He brought the Black Widow in once, and really, that was an outlier that should never have been counted. 

Lucky whined against his legs and Clint sighed, leaning down for scritches.

In the end, he finds Nat just like he did in the very beginning - or rather, she finds him. 

He’s spent the last 3 days holed back up in Bed-Stuy, panicked trip to Connecticut a minor blip on the radar, when gets up to fetch coffee pot and falls backwards over his couch, because Natasha turns out to be two feet behind him. 

Luck woofs in delight and jumps on her, which is handy, as it gives Clint about five seconds to frantically hide some of the evidence that he’s broken into a number of intelligence agencies to search for her.

“Hey! Hey!, uh… hi” Clint babbles, and thank god Lucky’s got his back because Nat raises an unimpressed eyebrow as Clint tries to climb back over the arm of the couch without becoming victim to the laundry pile. 

“Barton.” comes the dry acknowledgment. He takes a moment to consider how unfair it is, that Nat can always look perfect; cool, calm and collected. Clint’s t-shirt had actually belonged to Kate in a former life, and he’s only wearing one sock after Lucky decided he required it’s pair. He can feel said sock becoming damp and squelchy against his toes, with what he would hazard a guess is the dregs of his coffee cup he knocked over. 

“You’re here” he says. She’s standing just out of arm’s reach, an unreadable expression on her face. He clears his throat awkwardly. “I didn’t know if you’d come back.”

The mask crumbles at the edges, and Nat looks almost uncertain. Clint doesn’t like it. An uncertain Nat is like a singing Fury or a modest Tony - it’s just something that shouldn’t exist in the world. 

“I mean,” the words fall out, “you kissed me and then I was a dick and screwed it up and then I didn’t know what to say, but I thought you maybe did it on accident and I didn’t want to-”

“You were staring at my lips,” she interrupted him, very softly. “I assumed -” and she stops talking.

Gears and cogs are thunking heavily into the walls of Clint’s brain, which is imploding in every direction. One of the cogs apparently takes out his brain-to-mouth filter, which has always been fairly loosely attached, and is the single, only reason Clint says what he does next, trying to stop himself even as his mouth opens without his control. 

“I didn’t have my hearing aids in - I was trying. to read…” Natasha steps swiftly backwards, and Clint lunges after her.

“No. No! Nat, that’s not what I meant, I-”

“Save it Barton,” she snaps back, her face shuttering. “I apologise for my actions. It won’t happen again.”

The door is still open by a few inches, wobbling back and forth on a squeaky hinge that he never did get around to fixing after that one time Kate somersaulted into it. 

The door is open and Nat’s moving towards it and Clint has never regretted his inability to be able to say the right thing at the right time more in his life. 

And so, as the tried and true backup method, he takes up Plan B, which is to just say _something_. 

“I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU AND I HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH YOU EVER SINCE THE DAY YOU FISHED ME OUT OF THE DUMPSTER BEHIND THE COFFEE SHOP.” he screeched, frantically hurling himself in front of the door.

A deadly silence fell over the flat.

There’s a reason Plan B isn’t -, well, Plan A. 

Clint’s panting, his blood pounding in his ears in a rhythmic chant.

you_FOOL, _you_FOOL, _you_FOOL, _you_FOOL, _you_FOOL, _you_FOOL, _you_FOOL, _you_FOOL_

A barred door has never stopped Natalia Alianova Romanova from getting somewhere she intended to be in her life. He has seen Nat bulldoze through doors, locked doors, concrete walls, cement-stone walls, _steel bank vaults_ and still come up running, dust falling from her boots. So, when she stomps toward him, he can only assume she’s going to go right through him as well. 

It’s why he wasn’t expecting it, when Natasha seizes his face in her hands and kisses him.

Clint had kissed and been kissed by a lot of people in his life.

None of them were Nat.

He knows Nat. He knows Nat from the divot at the top of her skull to the scars on the pads of her toes, he knows how she likes her cereal and the specific voltage she sets the widow’s bites to during a fight. He knew she enjoyed it when Lucky would put his head in her lap but didn’t like the dog stretched out completely on top of her, he knew she liked Captain Crunch but only on Tuesdays, for some bizarre reason, and he knew completely and unequivocally that no matter where he was in the world, or how bad the mess he’d landed in, Nat would be there if he needed her.

Nat kissed him like she fought him, and Clint returned the favour, throwing all in. 

Her lips were hot against his, her hands burning palm prints into him where they pressed up against his neck, while his arms sprouted goose bumps at the same time. 

Her hair was soft and her eyes had lost that horrible vulnerable look, her feet sliding between his as she stretched up to him. 

He hit the door and fell backwards, lurching the six inches until the door slammed into the frame and knocked his head painfully into the wood, his legs choosing the same moment to fall out from under him.

Nat followed him down, swinging one leg over so she was seated on top of them, the two of them pooling on the floor against the door without breaking the kiss. 

He had his hearing aids in but could hear nothing, totally deaf and blind to everything that wasn’t his partner in his lap, still kissing him into the door.

“You kiss like you fight Barton,” she murmured, somehow nearly perfectly mirroring his own thoughts in reverse. He grin was sharp though, lips bitten red and eyes wide and bright. The grin of a Russian wolf. “You’re losing.”

“Then I call Uncle,” he gasped, and found the underside of her jaw with his lips.

He kissed his way down the column of her throat, biting softly at the patch of skin just under the corner of her jawbone, after feeling her writhe against him when he ran the tip of his tongue over the flushed skin. She was quiet, from her perch on top of him, but her hands were wrapped around his shoulders like a vice, her thighs digging into his hips, keeping him pinned firmly where she wanted him. He knows he’s gasping, tiny noises bubbling in the back of his throat getting muffled as he kisses his way down her neck and along her shoulder, before a hand releases his shoulder and she pulls his face back to hers.

The kiss was rough, and Clint had a single spare braincell to give a thought to be grateful he was up against the door, and acknowledge that he still may yet end up going through it. A whimper escaped his lips as Nat pulled back a little, his bottom lip caught between her teeth and fuck it, he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her back into him, praying the hinges on the door would hold.

It seemed it was Nat’s turn to explore, as she kissed her way over his pulse point, making him squirm underneath her as he felt her warm breath fan over the skin. She had let go of both of his shoulders now, and her hands had somehow snuck under his shirt without his noticing, although he was very, very aware that those hands were now trailing over his ribs.

“OH MY GOD, MY EYES!”

Katie-Cat’s horrified screech broke the bubble quite effectively, and Clint swam up from a daze, remembering where he was.

Oops. He turns his head reluctantly away from Natasha, her head also swivelling around, to where Kate is balanced on the window sill, one hand covering her eyes. 

Bucky waves from beside her, standing on the fire escape with a bullet ridden target stand slung over his back. 

Clint waved back weakly, and Natasha huffed a suspicious sounding laugh from beside him. “Umm,” he said slowly, his lips slightly numb from having the living daylights kissed out of him. “I think I forgot Katie was home.”

“My god Barton, there are _rules_ about this,” Kate snarled, crawling in through the window backwards, still holding a bow in one hand with her other hand still clapped firmly over her eyes. They’re both fully clothed, sitting against the front door making out like teenagers, and Katie has absolutely seen Clint in more compromising situations than this but apparently that doesn’t matter right now. 

“Hello Kate” says Natasha, not moving an inch from where she’s still straddling Clint’s lap. Kate grunts in return, and Bucky swings himself inside the window easily, tossing the target on the floor. “Congratulations,” he offered in Russian, nodding at Natasha, and Natasha nods back, the two of them looking very seriously at each other while Clint tries to figure out if he can safely stand up without scandalising anybody.

Kate’s grumbling to herself while she marches around the apartment collecting her gear, magically avoiding falling over Lucky, who is all too excited at having all of his favourite people in the same room. She’s finally decided that it’s safe to take her hand away from her eyes. “We are out. You two can continue your make out session, Bucky and I have run out of targets to shoot, we’re heading to the range.”

Natasha barks out a sudden laugh, and he barely bites back a whine as she climbs off him. He gingerly bends forward, wincing at the cacophony of creaks as the door splinters back into its hinges, and takes Natasha’s proffered hand to haul himself up. 

Kate moves to stand right in front of him, eyeing him with a death glare. He’d be nervous, except, it’s Katie-Cat. He taught her that death glare.

Sure enough, after a minute, it splinters, and he has a happy Katie-Cat beaming at him. She climbs up on his feet to pull his head down by the hair, kissing the top of his head, and he can’t help but grin goofily back at her. 

“Good job dummy,” she said softly. It would be too soft for even Nat to hear, if Nat were not who she was, but that’s alright. “I’m glad. But don’t futz this up, okay?”

He nods, squashing Kate to his chest in a bear hug, pressing his cheek to the top of her head and grinning sideways at Nat to where she’s standing at Bucky’s side. 

Bucky looks vaguely proud. 

Huh. Nice to know the whole gang’s on board. He supposes that’s just what happens, when you get invested in other people’s love-life after you have a heart to heart on the floor with a jar of peanut butter. 

“Out of the way Hawkeye,” Kate said, smiling softly. She prods him with her nose until he’s out of the way of the door, opening it tentatively. It makes a series of alarming noises, but it doesn’t fall off the hinges and that’s what counts. “Lucky!”

Pizza Dog leaps up at his name, bounding past Clint to speed out the door. 

“And find a sock for the doorknob Barton!” Kate yells as Bucky troops out, pulling the door shut behind him. “I have to sleep here tonight, and I better not get back to the sight of your bare arse on the couch again!”

She’s never going to let that go. He honestly thought she was in California, that one time and he’s certain he was more embarrassed than she was.

Natasha laughs openly at him from where she’s taken up a perch on the kitchen bench, and they listen to their little family clomp their way down the stairs, Pizza Dog woofing in delight at the unexpected opportunity for a walk. 

Finally, they’re out of earshot. 

“I have a couch?” he offers, trying not to waggle his eyebrows and failing. She smirked, but she’s known him for long enough that she’s used to his dumbassery. 

“I also have a couch,” Nat counters, lifting her legs up so she can pull him toward her by his hips, wrapping her legs around his waist when he’s close enough. “And my couch is on a secure floor where nosy children and assassins can’t come bursting through the windows.”

Clint’s a bit preoccupied by this point, the corners of his mouth threatening to split in half from a smile wider than the seven-mile bridge.

“Sounds good” he says, nudging his nose to the side of hers. He’s still smiling as he leans in to kiss her, messy and warm as she smiles back.

It’s a while before they make it to the couch. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This last chapter has definitely been my favourite to write. Let me know what you think, I'd love to know if you liked it! You can also come find me at [Tumblr](https://radpeacharbiter.tumblr.com)


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